Transnationalism, internationalism

"Can religion can be squared with cosmopolitanism? Must religion continue to be bracketed from the public sphere in an effort to domesticate and manage the competing claims of various faiths?
This essay suggests that the answer can be found in the insights offered by a postsecular view, and examines Charlotte Brontë’s most transnational novel, Villette, as a case study. Though it is often read as a species of anti-Catholic fiction, Villette, set in an imaginary space based on Belgium, is no simple invective against Catholic institutions and Gallic cultural practices. Instead, Villette uses Gothic conventions to dramatize the challenges and possibilities of a pluralism inflected by national and religious difference. Through the trans-Channel courtship of the Catholic Paul Emanuel and the ultra-Protestant Lucy Snowe, the narrative reveals how sectarian religious difference—often assumed to be a force of ethnocentric division—can offset the tendency of Victorian cosmopolitanism to privilege Englishness. Thus, the essay argues that an emphasis on religious difference demonstrates how moments such as Lucy’s confession are central to the novel’s pluralistic ethos.
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The 20th century ended with a “bang” in Puerto Rico, producing one of the most powerful and decisive massive demonstrations that the young 21st century first saw. Broadly, this paper will focus on the meaning and repercussions of the activism that took place in relation to Vieques. Specifically, I will outline the battle against the US Navy undertaken by Viequenses, Puerto Ricans, and activists in the United States and around the world after 4/19/1999—the fateful date when a stray bomb during the Navy’s training exercises on the island killed David Sanes, a civilian security guard working at the base. In essence, this paper articulates and highlights aspects of the struggle between a
small island-municipality in the middle of the Caribbean Sea and the biggest military power on the face of the Earth, in order to extrapolate the lessons offered by the massive transnational social movement that emerged in support of Vieques.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chinese artists began to leave China, emigrating to the West to some of the world’s most established cultural hubs including the cities of Paris, Berlin and New York. This provided the opportunity for self-reflection, individual and collaborative reflective experiences on their identity, home country, origin, history, society, politics, and in turn, developed a new globalised Chinese artistic and curatorial practice that negotiated, to them, unknown Western paradigms and the canons of Western-centric art historical discourse. They were responsible for building a new “transcultural” Chinese art history that was to change the way in which Chinese art was translated.

All translations are subject to applied, different socio-historic contexts where ‘a heritage often produces a spectacle of essentialist national identity’ (Coombes 1992: 488), which in this paper is termed as international exoticism and “Chineseness” in the eyes of the West. This exoticism is part of what is known as the “disappearing world” phenomenon, where the West is seen to fear the over immersion, thus loss, of its own culture and heritage, and so looks beyond its own locality for a new fragile exoticism, a world yet unpresented through ‘difference’ (Coombes 1992: 491) - in this case China. Whilst it may seem to be stating the obvious, curators should try to act objectively and not get swayed by this exoticism or concept of “tradition”. As Coombes states,

‘…the cultural object can never be an empty vessel waiting to be filled with meaning, but rather is a repository replete with meanings that are never imminent but always contingent.’ (Coombes 1992: 489)

This paper will examine, as a case study, the representation of China as part of the renowned and longest-standing international art festival, the Venice Biennale (45th Venice Biennale entitled Cardinal Points of the Arts, Venice, Italy (14 June – 10 October 1993)) - a noteworthy moment in the translation of contemporary Chinese art on the international art stage. Entitled Passagio a Oriente (Passage to the East), this exhibition of purely avant-garde painting was presented through a survey exhibition using the curatorial strategies of international exoticism and “Chineseness”, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva with Helena Kontova with consultation from Li Xianting and Francesca Dal Lago. Through analysing the collaborative curatorial process employed here, and critical public opinion, I will aim to question, is this case study when Chinese art became contemporary and global within the international art world? Can curators recognise the cultural, political and economic infrastructures inherent in the artist’s artworks or objects on a local level, in China, before it is “transculturally” translated in the West? Or are we heading towards operating as a catch-all category where diverse artworks are grouped together for cultural plurality (Maharaj 1994:29)? Will this produce homogenized curatorial consequences? Does the acknowledgement of dialectic and cultural differences/nuances always mean that it will be translated as “foreign” or Chinese? Or is assimilation and adaptation needed as part of the curatorial strategy? Ultimately, can we escape a “Chineseness” of contemporary Chinese art?

Coombes, Annie (1992) ‘Inventing the ‘Postcolonial’: Hybridity and Constituency in Contemporary Curating’. In Donald Preziosi, (Ed.) (1998) The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (pp. 486-497). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Maharaj, Sarat (1994) ‘Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other’. In Jean Fisher (Ed.) Global Visions: towards a new internationalism in the visual arts (pp. 28-35), London: Kala Press in association with The Institute of International Visual Arts.

In 1962 in Sochi, USSR, the renowned Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz found himself in a private, impromptu, transnational poetry recitation with the Chilean poet and future Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda. Both men were in town because of the Lenin prize, fellow travelers in the political, as well as the literal sense of the word. Although neither man spoke the language in which the other composed, according to witnesses, they seemed to understand each other’s poetry perfectly. Eleven years after his meeting with Neruda, Faiz was called upon to dust off his apparently preternatural abilities in Spanish, this time for a two-week invited tour of post-revolutionary Cuba. This talk concerns the travelogue, or safarnama, Faiz wrote in the wake of that trip. Unlike the “perfect understanding” of his exchange with Neruda, the safarnama exemplifies the practical limits of Faiz’s desire for socialist internationalism, cross-cultural understanding, and South-South solidarity. At the same time, Faiz’s story can tell us as much about his view of Pakistan as about the “dūr darāz gher-marūf jazīra” (far off, unknown island) it claims to represent. This talk makes sense of the Safarnama-e Cuba in light of Faiz’s other safarname, especially his USSR travelogue Mah-o-sal-e ashnai, as well as other post-revolutionary Cuban travelogues such as Gabriel García Márquez’s “Cuba de cabo a rabo.”

Since its creation in 1998, the “German-Russian Historical Commission” has conducted research on the Communist International. Thanks to the archival revolution, the Commission has succeeded in closing important gaps in earlier research on German–Russian relations and the history of German communism. This volume contains over 500 mostly unpublished documents, extensively annotated (about 5000 footnotes), and nearly 1000 abstracts of decisions made by the Soviet Politburo,  it will become a standard work long consulted by future researchers concerning the impact of German-Soviet relations, their relevance for the interwar period, the history of KPD and the history of Communism in general. Hitherto unresolved research questions could be resolved and partial aspects corrected.

Mi texto escrito para mi ciclo (13 proyecciones) "La Tricontinental. Cine, utopía e internacionalismo" para el Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid).
My text written for my film program (13 screenings) "Tricontinental. Cinema, Utopia and Internationalism for Museum Reina Sofía (Madrid).

The necessity of accounting for transnational flows in national histories of design is generally accepted in design scholarship. Equally acknowledged, however, is the lack of established frameworks. Based on the premise that the relevance of theoretical frameworks lies in the effects they enable, this panel advances from a re-engagement with the empirical. This allows us to reflect on how our research materials challenge assumed categories of ‘national’ and ‘design’ and suggest possibilities of co-producing alternative national design histories. Each paper in this panel tests the potentialities of one modality of empirical material—respectively, objects, subjects, and infrastructures—in rearticulations of national histories of design in times of globalization:

Lightweight, Compact and Tropic-Proof: Dutch Design as Global Infrastructure by Joana Meroz
Inquiries into national design often stop at the borders of the nation-state. By tracing the transnational
infrastructures involved in the making of ‘Dutch Design’, this paper discusses Dutch Design as a global
assemblage comprising diverse political agendas, technological innovations, global transport systems, and
climatic circumstances.

Shaping Belgian, European and International Design Policies: The Transnational Trajectory of the Belgian
Policymaker Josine des Cressonnières (1925-1985) by Katarina Serulus
When studying national design promotion, the nation-state pops up as a self-evident category that precedes all others. Instead, this paper examines Des Cressonnières’ transnational pursuits to account for the mutual shaping of national, supra-national and international policies.

Immigrant Design: Citizenship and Practical Nationality by Javier Gimeno Martinez.
National histories of design tend to be flexible in what designers or manufacturers to include, but less so
concerning the artefacts. This paper explores an inclusive approach focused on the artefacts that shape a given national design landscape, regardless their authorship.

Ruggero Vasari was a vital figure in the history of Futurism and played a key role in the movement’s relations with Central and Eastern Europe. The specific interplay between his artistic identity as an Italian Futurist on one hand and his predominantly European professional contacts and career on the other offers a symptomatic ensemble of elements that might help the historian when reassessing theoretical definitions of the avant-garde and its international modes of operation. This essay attempts to offer a more exacting explanation of what were the coordinates of Futurism at play
in these international settings and in Vasari’s work itself. In this sense, it analyses the international alliances which he established in the1920s with several artists and intellectuals in the German capital at the time, such as Ivan Puni, Karlis Zale, Viktor Shklovsky and Viking Eggeling. It retraces the way in which Vasari’s conception of radical art and his attitude of stylistic ecumenism succeeded in attracting to Futurism artists who, often as a result of their condition as political exiles, rejected the more overtly politicized tenets of Constructivism. It concludes by outlining the repercussions that this large avant-garde network had on the fate of Vasari’s own activity as a dramatist.

In one of the first volumes to address social work practice with this emergent and often marginalized population, practitioners and scholars specializing in transnational issues develop a framework for transnational social work practice. They begin with the historical and environmental context of transnational practice and explore the psychosocial, economic, environmental, and political factors that affect at-risk and vulnerable transnational groups. They then detail practical strategies, supplemented with case examples, for working with transnational populations utilizing this population's existing strengths. They conclude with recommendations for incorporating transnational social work into the curriculum.

Etienne Balibar (2010) sees in a pan-European populism a chance for the rebirth of Europe's democracy. DiEM25, launched by Yanis Varoufakis, is a transnational European movement that seeks to democratize the European Union and save it from itself. This paper argues that DiEM can be perceived as a positive response to Balibar's call. By utilizing the methodology of the so-called Essex School of Discourse Analysis, I examine the aforementioned hypothesis. What we are witnessing, I claim, is a case of transnational populism, a paradoxical combination for those who identify populism with nationalism. Laclau's formal approach, adopted in this paper, conceives populism as a particular logic detached from certain contents which implies that populism can be anything, and thus there is no contradiction in a transnational populism. What are the possibilities of DiEM's transnational populism for Europe's democratic politics? Is DiEM a chance for European democracy?

Richard Wright's The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference has long been a fundamental book in Bandung historiography. As a crucial companion volume to The Color Curtain, Roberts and Foulcher's Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and The Bandung Conference showcases the previously unknown side of Wright's Bandung narrative, as told from the perspectives of the vibrant group of Indonesian intellectuals and writers who hosted him in Indonesia in 1955. Showcasing Wright’s previously unknown interactions with Indonesian modernists and his previously unknown lecturing activities in Indonesia, this book has major implications for any reading of postcolonial history and culture after the Asian-African Conference of 1955.

O presente trabalho tem por intenção identificar e discutir os elementos nacionalistas e universalistas presentes no discurso e na prática do Esperanto. Para iss o, tomamos como ponto de partida uma descrição do Esperanto, em seus principais aspectos: enquanto idioma internacional, filosofia e cultura. A partir daí, mostrarmos que, em muitos casos, seu caráter internacional toma por base argumentos similares aos de movimentos nacionalistas, além de mesclar ideais humanistas com outros típicos do atual relativismo cultural. É a partir desses discursos, aparentemente conflitantes, que o Esperanto busca se afirmar como língua internacional auxiliar, seguindo a concepção de que seus falantes são cidadãos do mundo.

Download full text at: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:50379

This essay focuses on territorial conflicts between European masonic bodies outside Europe, and on the impact of these conflicts on inner European masonic relations. The period between c. 1870 and c. 1930 marks the height of the European expansion respectively the age of ‘high imperialism’. It also marks the first wave of decolonization. The tides of international masonic relations mirror these overall developments. Bilateral territorial conflicts had a major impact on masonic internationalism around 1900 and in the interwar period. Geopolitical rivalry both deepened and blurred the demarcations between the various ideological ‘camps’ of (European) freemasonries. The ‘Association maçonnique internationale’ made efforts to implement a ‘Code de Droit Maçonnique international’ and to establish itself as a global tribunal of arbitration. By the end of the period, territorial jurisdiction had become a key issue when it came to defining masonic ‘regularity’.

This conceptual article argues that the well-established sociological concept of cosmopolitanism has been inadequately applied to organised labour, and specifically to international activities of trade unions. Taking a Marxian perspective, it sets these subjects side-by-side, considering firstly what the experience of international trade unionism can reveal about cosmopolitanism, and secondly theorising the forms cosmopolitanism may take in international trade union activity. In answer to the first question, it seeks to show how the development of cosmopolitanism assumes radically different forms among union members and managerial elites. In answer to the second question, it typologises international trade unionism using two categories termed ‘managerial’ and ‘mobilising’ internationalisms. These categories have material determinants, and in each the interaction between material interest representation and cosmopolitan normativity assumes different forms.

"Hegel decretó que «el búho de Minerva solo emprende el vuelo al anochecer» subrayando con esto que los avances sociales solo pueden ser comprendidos retrospectivamente. El estado actual de la investigación sobre governance parece confirmar este diagnóstico. Su surgimiento ha estado en marcha prácticamente durante todo el siglo XX; en tanto, la semántica sobre governance puede rastrearse hasta el periodo de entreguerras. Pero solo en la aurora del nuevo milenio los estudios académicos sobre derecho, ciencias políticas y relaciones internacionales pudieron hacerse cargo de estos nuevos avances. Más aún, después de casi dos décadas de investigación sobre governance se han dado solo dos de tres pasos en la construcción de un paradigma. Primero: el término governance ha sido adoptado como una expresión genérica pero inherentemente imprecisa y controvertida que designa un vasto universo que incluye toda clase de estructuras, desde organizaciones internacionales, empresas multinacionales, ONGs, hasta estructuras administrativas nacionales y locales. Segundo: este paso preliminar ha sido continuado por un enorme conjunto de estudios empíricos relativos a los tipos de procesos en los que estas estructuras organizacionales se encuentran vinculadas. Estos engloban desde comitología y casos de la OMC —en el contexto de la Unión Europea— hasta redes globales interestatales, organizaciones de responsabilidad social empresarial (RSE) y la gestión de ONGs y actividades de base comunitaria. Sin embargo, el paso final y decisivo en la construcción del paradigma, a saber, avanzar hacia una teoría general del governance, no se ha materializado.
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Millions of Europeans were uprooted by flight, resettlement, deportation or evacuation during and after the Second World War. This volume of essays examines both forced and voluntary population movements within the broader context of Europe in the aftermath of war and addresses displacement in East and West, including Germany, Russia, Poland, Greece, Italy, Israel and Britain. The authors bring to life problems of war and post-war chaos and assess the lasting social, political and demographic consequences.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction; J.Reinisch

PART I: EXPLAINING POSTWAR DISPLACEMENT

Trajectories of Population Displacement in the Aftermaths of Two World Wars; P.Gatrell

Reconstructing the Nation-State: Population Transfer in East-Central Europe, 1944-48; M.Frank

PART II: EXPULSIONS AND FORCED TRANSFERS

Forced Migration of German Populations During and After the Second World War: History and Memory; R.Schulze

The Exodus of Italians from Istria and Dalmatia 1945-56; G.Corni
Evacuation Versus Repatriation: the Polish-Ukrainian Population Exchange, 1944-1946; C.Gousseff

PART III: NATIONAL AND ETHNIC PROJECTS

'National Refugees', Displaced Persons and the Reconstruction of Italy: the Case of Trieste; P.Ballinger

Return, Displacement and Revenge: Majorities and Minorities in Osnabrück at the End of the Second World War; P.Panayi
Stateless Citizens of Israel: Jewish DPs and Zionism in Postwar Germany; A.Patt

PART IV: LABOUR AND EMPLOYMENT

German Refugees and Labour in the Soviet Zone of Germany, 1945-1949; J.Reinisch

From Displaced Persons to Labourers: Allied Employment Policies in Postwar West Germany; S.Salvatici

British Migration Policy and Displaced Persons in Europe; J-D.Steinert

PART V: CHILDREN
The Return of Evacuated Children to Leningrad, 1944-46; E.White

Relocating Children During the Greek Civil War, 1946-1949: State Strategies and Propaganda; L.Hassiotis

Epilogue: A Disorder of Peoples: the Uncertain Ground of Reconstruction in 1945; G.Eley

Bibliography

Index

Concepts for social reform to create an ideal society model experienced several peaks of international diffusion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article enquires into the relationship between the transnational dissemination of ideas and the key carriers of interaction in social reform associations, with a special focus on Belgian actors. Arguing that Belgian key figures in loose personal networks were important driving forces for stimulating and organizing the reform associations, the article analyses the making and development of personalized “ epistemic communities” and the clashes between different orders of allegiance of the actors– knowledge and its distribution, internationalism and nationalism. Starting in the 1850s, we show how non-governmental experts springing from a close network of Belgian actors successfully shaped the social agenda transnationally until the First World War. This heyday of internationalism, in which not only the Belgian state but even more civil-society actors played an important part, declined after 1914. During the post-war era, government-oriented internationalism considered social engineering as an international administrative matter so that the former civil society
agents, especially from the “small big” countries such as Belgium, experienced a decline in influence. In this atmosphere, nationalist experiences and tensions on a political level affected the flourishing pre-war spirit of internationalism in private associations on social engineering. After the war, their role changed significantly. The private associations were used to channel and communicate social reform ideas as expert forums corresponding with the ILO and the League of
Nations.

Since the 1970s, thousands of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) students have been amongst the 40,000 recipients of a free education at universities and other further education institutions in Cuba. Drawing on interviews conducted with Muslim MENA university students in Cuba, including both citizens and refugees, I suggest that their legal statuses played central roles during their time in the Caribbean island, as well as structuring their expectations for the future. This article examines both Muslim youth experiences of, and Cuban motivations behind, an internationalist education programme that has been marginalised by both academics and policy-makers alike. Further, it explores and contextualises these students' perceptions of life in Cuba throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and of the conditions in their places of origin, which in many cases are refugee camps or hosting countries. In addition to offering these individuals a further education with an aim of enhancing self-sustainability in their ‘home’ countries/spaces, I propose that this programme is a clear alternative, and even a challenge, to the way in which the education of foreign students is structured and managed elsewhere by states and institutions driven by different socio-economic and political priorities.

No weakening, but rather an expansion, of statehood can be observed in the contemporary world. This does not, on the other hand, imply that extensive forms of constitutional ordering do not exist outside the realm of states. Instead, the evolution of world society has been characterized by a protracted dual movement where the expansion and densification of statehood and autonomous forms of transnational ordering gradually emerged in a mutually constitutive fashion. One implication of this is that neither the concept of the state nor the concept of nonstate transnational entities is adequately capable of delineating the object of constitutional analysis. Instead, the concept of normative orders has been introduced as an overarching category capable of identifying the contexts within which constitutional ordering emerges.
Subsequently, a distinction between the internal and external dimensions of the law of normative orders has been introduced, specifying them as respectively oriented towards establishing internal condensation of a given normative order and external compatibility between different normative orders. With this background, a framework for the analysis of constitutional frameworks of normative orders is developed. The central element is a distinction among three dimensions: First, a constitution implies a coupling between a constitutional object, in the form of a hierarchical organization of a given normative order capable of reproducing an autonomous source of authority, and a concordant legal framework. Second, constitutionalization implies a coupling between an internal reconstruction of an external constitutional subject within the constitutional object, and the register of legal rights, establishing a framework for exchanges between the constitutional object and the wider world as represented by the constitutional subject. Third, constitutionalism denotes the institutionalization of a double function, in the form of a principle-based and legally fortified striving toward universal inclusion, providing a sense of direction in time through an articulated form of constitutional consciousness.
The insights developed are briefly illustrated by the case of the global Fairtrade Certification System.

Globalization is a process of not unification but rapprochement of cultures, formation of a global civilization as a «federation» of local civilizations. In connection with transformations of the phenomenon of nation in the post-colonial period, its tendency to transform from a «supraethnic» into «interethnic» phenomenon, a global transnational culture is forming. With respect to this process, it makes sense to speak about not degradation, but a change in the place of ethnic cultures and even an increase in their role in the time of intensive globalization. 

Keywords: ethnology, ethnicity, nation, globalization, culture, postcolonialism, transnationalism.